Cloning and Expression of a

Phenylpropanoid volatile components in plants are useful and valuable not only as flavorings, but also as medicines and food supplements. The pharmacological actions and toxicities of these compounds have been well studied but their synthetic pathways are generally unclear. In this study, we mined expressed sequence tag libraries of pure strains of perilla maintained for over 30 years for their oil type and conducted gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analyses of the perilla oils to confirm the presence of monohydrates speculated to be intermediates of the phenylpropene synthetics pathways. These putative monohydrate intermediates and their regioisomers were synthesized to identify the reaction products of assays of heterologously expressed enzymes. An enzyme involved in the synthesis of a phenylpropanoid volatile component was identified in perilla. Expression of this enzyme in